More recently, Murray Waas won the Barlett-Steele Award in Business Investigative Reporting for stories that he wrote for Reuters about the health insurance industry. In its citation making the award, the judges said:

Murray Waas began his career as an investigative reporter for the late columnist Jack Anderson, when he 18 years old and still a freshman in college. Columns he wrote for Anderson about U.S. corporations then doing business with the genocidal regime of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have been widely credited with helping bring about economic sanctions later imposed against the Amin regime by the U.S. government.

By Woodward Now I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts—and then publishing—the biggest story in town. He’s also putting those parts together for us.

The Biggest Story in Town (almost a term of art in political Washington) is the one that would cause the biggest earthquake if the facts sealed inside it started coming out now. Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception—and decision-making—had been.

Another profile of Waas in U.S. News & World Report by Elizabeth Halloran can be found here. Asked by Halloran why he does not like to appear on televison, Waas answered:

There’s not much of it that really enlightens us. There are journalists who don’t do journalism anymore. They go on television; they’re blogging; they’re giving speeches; they’re going to parties. And then at the end of the week they’ve had four or five hours devoted to journalism. TV takes time away from actual reporting. An acquaintance of mine, [Doonesbury cartoonist] Garry Trudeau, went a long time without going on TV, and we talked about having a 12-step program for people who appear on television too much. It would be a boom business in Washington. But Garry has lapses – he’s been on Nightline,Charlie Rose. I also believe he did a morning show one time. But I’ve been steadfast. I have not been broken. I thought it was me and Garry against the world, the two amigos. He’s left me hanging out there.

But Waas — whose blog is called Whatever, Already — doesn’t toot his own horn much and only reluctantly granted an interview. “My theory is, avoid the limelight, do what’s important and leave your mark. . . . If my journalism has had impact, it has been because I have spent more time in county courthouses than greenrooms,” he says.

When journalists are seen as pursuing stories to get “television appearances or million-dollar book contracts, it becomes much more difficult for us to play our role.”…

Last year, Waas disclosed that Libby had told prosecutors that in 2003 he met with Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, and told her about CIA operative Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald cited the Waas account in a letter to Libby’s lawyer that set in motion the waiver springing Miller from jail on contempt charges.

The Los Angeles Times’ late Pulitzer Prize winning media critic, David Shaw, wrote this long analysis in the fall of 1992 of Waas’ reporting about covert U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan and first Bush administration prior to our first war with Iraq. The Columbia Journalism Review published this article as well about his reporting on the prewar policies leading up to the war.

Waas says from his home in Washington: “I’m hardly a renegade. If anything, the bar is raised much higher because you’re going against the pack. It’s strange: If you report accurately and truthfully, you get attacked. If you make a mistake with the herd — by reporting a semen-stained dress or nonexistent Secret Service agents who saw the president in a compromising position — there are no consequences.”

But it’s Salon’s investigative journalism that has raised old media’s hackles because, Ross says, it was done the old-fashioned way: shoe leather, cultivating sources, working the phones — no new-media tricks here…. [Waas] writes for Salon, he says, because “I like the daily rhythm and the immediacy.”

Weir says the appearance of Waas’ investigative reporting in Salonreminds him of other eras when muckrakers started popping up in magazines, underground papers and community weeklies. “It’s always taken a while for these kind of exposes to percolate up from the marginalized media like alternative weeklies into the mainstream press,” he says. “On the Web, not only does the material transcend the boundaries of space and time through linkages, it can travel faster and have a wider impact sooner. It’ll be interesting to see how these findings trickle into the mainstream media.”

Web-only journalism officially graduated to the Beltway’s radar screen April 25, when Bill Clinton kicked off the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner by saying: “I just want to know one thing: How come there’s no table for Salon Magazine?”

A March 31, 2006 appraisal of his reporting regarding the misuse of prewar intelligence information by the second Bush administration to make the case to go to war with Iraq by Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin– which can be read by clicking here– concluded:

Murray Waas, a disciple of Jack Anderson, the ultimate outsider, has assembled a plump volume of the trial and grand-jury records in the case of I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to the vice president, convicted in March of obstruction of justice and lying in the case involving disclosure of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The transcripts make clear that Waas may have had less interest in Libby’s missteps than in the foibles of a cohort of Washington’s current insider journalists, among whom Tim Russert, Bob Woodward, Judith Miller (jailed for a time for refusing to testify), and Robert Novak (who first revealed Plame’s identity to the public), were the most celebrated. Their accounts of dealing with Libby and other members of the administration constitute an encyclopedia of insiderdom—the anonymous-source-concealment dance, the sometimes transparent charade of selective source protection, the willingness to be spun in exchange for access to power. Most embarrassingly, the trial revealed the far-from-precise methods of top-rank journalists—lost notebooks, illegible notes, shaky recollections.